Theology, technology, life & art

A Little Crazy

I’m going to do something a little crazy, I’ve decided. I’m going to go ahead and do like I wrote a bit back, and make Step Stool actually a thing over the course of the rest of the year. Not so crazy. What is a bit nuts is the way I’ve decided to go about that process. In short: as close to the hardest way possible as I can conceive.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time toying with Io. It’s a neat little language, very different in its approach to a lot of things than the languages I’ve used previously. My programming language history is very focused on the “normal” languages. The vast majority of real- world code I’ve written has been in one of C, PHP, or Python. I’ve done a good bit of Javascript along the way, more Fortran than anyone my age has any business having done, and a little each of Java and Ruby. Like I said: the normal ones. With the exception of Javascript, all of those are either standard imperative, object-oriented, or mixed imperative and object-oriented languages. Python and Ruby both let you mix in a fair bit of functional-style programming, and Javascript does a lot of that and tosses in prototypal inheritance to boot.

But still: they’re all pretty mainstream, “normal” languages. Io isn’t like that at all. For one thing, it’s hardly popular in any sense at all. Well-known among the hackers1 I know, perhaps, but not popular by any measure. It’s small. And it’s very alien in some ways. It’s prototypal inheritance, not normal inheritance. Courtesy of Javascript, I have a little familiarity with that, but it’s definitely still not my default way of thinking about inheritance. Python’s inheritance model (the one I use most frequently) is essentially the same as that in C++, Java, PHP, and so on—it’s normal class-driven inheritance. Io goes off and does full-blown prototypal inheritance; even just the little I’ve played with it has been fun.

Io also does a bunch of other things a lot different from the other languages I’ve used. First, there are no keywords or—formally speaking—even operators in the language. Every action (including ones like + or for) is simply a message. Every value is an object (so 1.0 is just as fully an object as an arbitrarily-defined Person). The combination means that writing 1 + 2 is actually just interpreted as the object 1 receiving the + message carrying as its “argument” the 2 object (really just the message contents). This is completely different at a deep paradigm level from the normal object-oriented approach with object methods, even in a language like Python where all elements are objects (including functions). The net result isn’t necessarily particularly different from calling methods on objects, but it is a little different, with have some interesting consequences. Notably (though trivially—or at least, so it seems to me at this point), you can pass a message to the null object without it being an error. More importantly, the paradigm shift is illuminating.

Io also has far more capabilities in terms of concurrency than any of the other languagues with which I’m familiar, because it actively implements the Actor Model, which means its implementation of messaging instead of object method calls can behave in concurrent ways. (I’d say more if I understood it better. I don’t yet, which is one of the reasons I want to study the language. Concurrency is very powerful, but it’s also fairly foreign to me.) It’s also like Lisp in that its code can be inspected and modified at runtime. I’ve wanted to learn a Lisp for several years for this kind of mental challenge, but the syntax has always just annoyed me too much ever to get there. Io will give me a lot of its benefits with a much more pleasant syntax. It has coroutines, which are new to me, and also helpful for concurrency.2

The long and short of it is that the language has a ton of features not present in the languages I have used, and—more importantly—is paradigmatically different from them. Just getting familiar with it by writing a goodly amount of code in it would be a good way to learn in practice a bunch of computer science concepts I never had a chance to learn formally.3

By now, as long as I’ve rambled about Io, you’ve probably figured out where I was going in that first paragraph. I’ve decided to stretch my brain a bit and write Step Stool in Io. There are bunches of static site generators out there in Python already, many of them quite mature. (This site is running on one of them as of the time I write this post—it’s quite solid, even its quirks and limitations occasionally annoy me.) The point of Step Stool has always been twofold, though. First, I’ve wanted to get to a spot where I was really running my own software to manage my site, letting me do whatever I want with it and guaranteeing I always understand it well enough to make those kinds of changes. Second, I’ve just wanted to learn a whole bunch along the way. Third, it’s right there in the website link: step-stool.io! How could I pass up such an opportunity?

It is that second goal that has pushed me to do this crazy project this crazy way. It’s crazier than just teaching myself a language in order to do the static site generator itself, too, because there are a few other pieces missing that I’ll need to write to make this work… like a Markdown implementation and an HTML templating language. I’ve never written anything remotely like either before, so I’m going to take the chance to learn a lot of new things. For the Markdown implementation, rather than relying on regular expression parsing (like most Markdowns do), I’m going to use a Parsing Expression Grammar. That will certainly be more efficient and reliable, but—more importantly—it is also outside my experience. I have yet to start thinking through how to tackle the HTML templating language implementation (though I know I am going to make it an Io implementation of Slim, which I quite like).

In any case, I’m going to be taking a good bit longer to get Step Stool finished. That is all right: I am going to learn a ton along the way, and I am quite sure I will have a blast doing it. And that is exactly what these kinds of projects are for.

I’ll post updates as I go, with the things I’m learning along the way. Hopefully they’ll be interesting (or at least entertaining).

Hackers in the original sense of the world. Not “crackers”, but people who like hacking on code, figuring things out the hard way.↩

Python 3.5 is actually adding coroutines, and I’m excited about that. I’ll feel much more comfortable with them there having used them in Io, I’m sure!↩

I got here backwards, as it were—by way of an undergraduate degree in physics. I don’t regret that for a second: I got a much broader education than I could have managed while getting an engineering degree, and most importantly learned how to learn: easily the most important skill anyone gains from any engineering degree.↩